Cellular Automata Music creates music by mapping the results of cellular automata evolution to musical pitch and duration values.
I implemented a version of Conway's Game of Life, which has a simple ruleset:The environment(neighborhood) is divided into cells, which do not change trhough the evolution.
The evolution takes place in uniform time steps, and all rules are applied at the same time.
Each cell is characterized by a state among a finite set of states.
Each cell evolves according to the same rules which depends only on the state of the cell and its neighboring cells.
Perl implementation of Conway's Game of Life
Simple KeyKit melody function
Generated Number File of a gliderGenerated Number File from a random set
How does this turn into music?
There are several popular ways of mapping the cellular generations onto the elements that make up music, such as pitch, duration, and tempo. In my implementation, I only considered the positions of live elements, and created notes according to their position. The patterns evolving from generation to generation are not as pronounced as they would be if I had differentiated notes by different patterns in a generation, but they are still present, usually manifesting themselves in a similar melody.
One change I would put in the program is grouping harmonic notes together, since one cell in the game of life is likely to create a child, a note close to it in grouping.